Courtesy of my father's lengthy service in the Navy, I've been able to use USAA1 for insurance for my whole adult life. A small but comfortable privilege. Now, I bring this up because of USAA has had a ready-for-prime-time, flexible, responsive, automated-voice-interface answering their phones since (at least) the mid nineties (it informed my comments on an earlier post about this category of convenience). It's been my preferred interface for paying bills since I got my first policy with them.
Anyway. I paid a bill recently, and the voice interaction on the phone felt laggy—compared to a system that's been working since before the turn of the millennium—and I formed a suspicion that someone has replaced the gut of the existing system with a big machine learning model.
Now, there is a sense in which that is a very good idea. The existing system presumably had trouble with some accents and a large model can learn to overcome that. But it still felt like a worse experience.
1 A mutual insurance corporation in the United States. Originally for US Army officers, they've expanded their membership criteria over the years but the idea appears to be to select a highly responsible membership base.
